About This Project

The genus Sarracenia, carnivorous pitcher plants native to North America, presents a long-standing evolutionary puzzle. While their ecology and morphology exemplify a carnivorous lifestyle, it is unknown how these plants obtain the enzymes necessary for digestion. Current research seeks to identify digestive genes in the plant genome, but the pitcher's microbial community is likely essential. Added transcriptomics will allow the untangling of vital plant-microbe interactions.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

For my dissertation, I'm studying the evolution of digestion in Sarracenia alata, including genetic novelty and microbial symbioses. The Carstens Lab has already invested heavily in the genomic aspects of this project, with a large amount of PacBio SMRT and BioNano Irys sequence data arriving in January. This data will allow us to determine the genes in Sarracenia that play a role in the digestive process, as well as their likely evolutionary history. Studies in other carnivorous plants such as Dionaea muscipula (Venus's Flytrap) suggest that digestive processes are developed by co-opting existing pathways such as immune response, but as carnivory has a number of independent origins in plants, different genes with different histories are likely involved in different lineages.

What is the significance of this project?

With such a large amount of Sarracenia sequence data in hand, I am uniquely positioned to answer a question has been debated by carnivorous plant growers and researchers for decades: how do the contributions of the fluid bacterial community compare to those of the host plant in Sarracenia pitchers? It is well-established that the fluid inside the leaf traps of S. alata hosts a wide range of bacterial species, but whether they are primarily mutualistic, commensal, or parasitic is unknown. At the most extreme, it has been suggested that the pitchers may not perform any digestion at all, merely serving as a reservoir for bacteria that perform all the necessary processes. This long-standing question has deeper significance, addressing how symbioses may allow novel functions to evolve.

What are the goals of the project?

For this project, we first intend to collect trap fluid from multiple wild populations of Sarracenia alata, to account for possible variation across its range. Then, the transcriptome of each population will be sequenced, including transcripts from the plant as well as those from the microbial community. Transcripts can be compared to the sequenced S. alata genome using nucleotide BLAST to determine which originate from the plant itself. Remaining sequences will be searched against a bacterial database to identify those of likely bacterial origin (with those that remain unidentifiable or of other origin removed). Finally, plant and bacterial sequences will be matched with a likely function using BLASTX (nucleotide-to-protein) and further gene ontogeny analyses.